1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document processing apparatus and document processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Techniques have been proposed which scale up/down, relocate, and otherwise manipulate an input document image and output a resulting new document. For example, in the field of copiers, a reduced printing technique has been implemented which prints plural page images by scaling them down and arranging them on a single page.
Also, layout editors such as DTP (desktop publishing) applications have been used to help operators lay out document component data on a computer. Such layout editors provide a method for generating a document easily by putting component data into one of layout templates prepared in advance. Furthermore, systems have been proposed in which component data is laid out automatically by a computer program rather than manually by the operator.
Also, a technique has been proposed for copying a scanned document by adding images and the like such as an advertisement and logo provided by a sponsor (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-331427).
Also, a technique has been proposed which, being provided with a logo printing mode, allows an operator to specify, via a user interface, a range in a scanned original in order for a custom logo image to be laid out and thereby outputs the scanned original by superimposing the logo image thereon (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 6-164894).
However, with the conventional techniques, the operator needs to explicitly specify where to lay out individual images in composing a page image, which makes it difficult to produce an image output by determining an optimal layout location for each image.